Content is the essence of the Internet and comes in many different forms that the current iteration of the Web2 Internet supports—text, audio, video, or a combination of all three. However, the content can hardly be called a free resource. It is content creators who are now becoming opinion leaders, influencers, and cornerstones of so many of the critical services that businesses rely on, such as advertising, marketing, and public relations management.
The need for content and its desire for independence, embodied by thousands of bloggers and independent artists, has spawned a huge online economy that trades in talent and often rakes in sales volumes that top-tier artists would drool over. This economy has been called the creator economy: a financial structure that allows independent people to earn from their self-expression by offering audiences the type of content they are willing to pay to consume.
Rising strength
The creator economy is a massive force: a unique online phenomenon that surpassed the $104 billion market size threshold at the end of 2021. With the explosion in demand for new content on popular platforms like TikTok that empowers independent artists and performers, experts are hesitant to make predictions about the potential size of the creation economy market in the near future.
The reason for the lack of real forecasts is that the creator economy is an extremely young phenomenon that began with the COVID-19 pandemic. The lockdowns unleashed a wave of talent among people who were locked up, resulting in the release of creativity that others incarcerated were eager to consume as much-needed entertainment.
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Given that the creators of microentrepreneurship are closely associated with influencer marketing, which has a market size of about $13.8 billion, one can understand the prospects that further expansion of this phenomenon can provide. More importantly, experts believe that the transition to a new technological environment will allow content creators to capture markets and industries with new opportunities to promote products and services.
Talent Decentralization
Over 50 million creators run their own talent economy, raising over $800 million in venture capital. Such figures are only a shadow of what they may become later, as new sites quickly appear.
The development of blockchain technologies has led to a radical revolution in the financial markets, empowering individuals, not organizations, and transferring ownership of data and funds to their holders. The qualities of blockchain—immutability, complete transparency, and unreliable nature of transactions—have permeated many industries, upsetting the balance of business orientation away from centralized corporate dependency towards decentralization. This shift in the basic concepts governing relations between participants, towards transactions, facilitated by smart contracts, has not gone unnoticed in the economy of the creator.
As the decentralized finance and GameFi sectors converge across their respective industries and divert many users away from traditional approaches to banking and gaming, it was only a matter of time before influencers and content creators decided to change the paradigm in their operating environments. The content creation model has changed forever with the introduction of blockchain technologies, which allow users to incentivize content creators while creators can actually monetize their talent without sharing revenue with centralized, often unfair hosting platforms.
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Transition to the Metaverse
The development of metaverses – fully digital environments based on blockchain in Web3 and virtual reality – will usher in a new era in content creation. Never before has talent had access to such an advanced set of tools to spruce up even the wildest ideas at the cusp of the real and digital worlds.
Metaverses allow creators to visualize anything from an opera concert in outer space against the background of nebulae to a blog stream on a desert island with stunning graphical detail. Anything that can be embodied in creativity can be realized in the metaverse for the benefit of all parties involved. By leveraging the limitless possibilities of the metaverse in its incorporation into virtual reality, content creators will be able to unleash their creativity and let it roam the wild. Such promises of unparalleled content quality can only be described as honeysuckle for an eager audience of viewers craving more variety in the types of content they consume and, more importantly, new experiences.
The blockchain foundation of the metaverse offers even more benefits for content creators as it allows them to use a variety of mechanisms to monetize their content through the universal nature of native cryptocurrencies. Users can bet their digital assets on specific creators, encouraging them to release more content of a certain type. Others may pay to access special content, while others may simply reward their favorite creators with donations. There are many ways to monetize, and content creators can always be sure that their talent will be paid, and no hosting platform will be able to deprive them of their earnings.
Even more lucrative are the prospects for business in terms of penetrating the content creator economy into the metaverse. Marketing, advertising, and promotion in general are reimagined with content that can be adapted in an endless variety of ways and easily integrated into select creators’ channels. The Metaverse provides entirely new frontiers for companies to deploy and reach, and creators are launch pads that can showcase products and services to their subscribers—for a fee.
In digital retrospective
The Metaverse is the next iteration of the Internet as we know it today: a completely user-centric environment that serves the purpose of taking creativity to the next level. However, audiences will not be the sole source of income for content creators as companies look to tap into this lucrative niche and exploit the opportunities offered by native, seamless and universal integration of advertising into VR content.
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The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Johnny Liu is the CEO of KuCoin, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges that was launched in 2017. Prior to joining KuCoin, he has accumulated rich experience in e-commerce, automobiles and luxury goods.